Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Yale School of Public Health, New Haven, CT, United States of America.
Yale-NUS College, Singapore, Singapore.
PLoS One. 2024 Aug 30;19(8):e0305866. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0305866. eCollection 2024.
Pregnancy is a universal experience shaped by sociocultural contexts. News media presents a unique opportunity to analyze public narratives of pregnancy and how it differs across cultures. Our study aims to (1) identify the most prevalent overall themes in news media narratives of pregnancy across 19 English-speaking countries, and (2) compare pregnancy narratives across geographic regions. We used the largest English news media corpus that included over 30 million news articles from more than 7000 news websites across 19 countries, and extracted a one-year data subset (2019; 1.5 billion words). Of the primary search terms 'pregnant' and 'pregnancy', we collated 240,464 descriptors that met criteria of lexical proximity and semantic bonding. Thereafter, we used topic modelling to identify the five most prevalent pregnancy-related themes: (1) complications and risk, (2) crime, (3) celebration, (4) celebrity births, and (5) contraception. Although there were regional differences, themes of complications and risk were most common, comprising 39.6% of all pregnancy narratives in our big-data corpus. The second-most dominant theme was crime (20.8%). Narratives of contraception were more prevalent in Europe, North America, and Oceania (27.2-31.3%) compared to Africa and Asia (11.9-19.6%). Though the vast majority of pregnancies are healthy, themes of complications and risk dominated the news media discourse; unchecked, this may be an avenue for misinformation, stress, and anxiety. In addition, lower prevalence of contraception narratives in Africa and Asia may reflect a gap that requires the attention of policymakers in building culturally-adapted programs to promote family planning and encourage open discussions about sexual health. Results contribute to the academic repository of societal representations of pregnancy through a big-data lens, providing contextual information for future development, implementation and evaluation of localized pregnancy-related campaigns.
怀孕是一种受社会文化背景影响的普遍经历。新闻媒体提供了一个独特的机会，可以分析公众对怀孕的叙述方式，以及不同文化之间的差异。我们的研究旨在：(1) 确定 19 个英语国家新闻媒体对怀孕的叙述中最普遍的总体主题；(2) 比较不同地理区域的怀孕叙述。我们使用了最大的英语新闻媒体语料库，其中包括来自 19 个国家的 7000 多个新闻网站的 3000 多万篇新闻文章，并提取了一年的数据子集（2019 年；15 亿个单词）。在主要的搜索词“怀孕”和“pregnancy”中，我们整理了 240464 个符合词汇接近度和语义联系标准的描述符。之后，我们使用主题建模来确定与怀孕相关的五个最普遍的主题：(1) 并发症和风险；(2) 犯罪；(3) 庆祝；(4) 名人分娩；(5) 避孕。尽管存在地区差异，但并发症和风险的主题最为常见，占我们大数据语料库中所有怀孕叙述的 39.6%。第二大主题是犯罪（20.8%）。避孕叙述在欧洲、北美和大洋洲（27.2-31.3%）比非洲和亚洲（11.9-19.6%）更为普遍。尽管绝大多数怀孕是健康的，但并发症和风险的主题主导了新闻媒体的报道；如果不加控制，这可能是错误信息、压力和焦虑的一个来源。此外，非洲和亚洲避孕叙述的低比例可能反映了一个需要政策制定者关注的差距，以便制定适应文化的方案，促进计划生育，并鼓励就性健康进行公开讨论。这些结果通过大数据视角为怀孕的社会代表性提供了学术知识库，为未来发展、实施和评估本地化的与怀孕相关的宣传活动提供了背景信息。
